Sunday, January 21, 2018

Dear God, when I cease struggling, I gain a brief awareness of how fundamentally you support me. If a challenge falls upon me, you are there without my even noticing – you deliver to me the proper words or deeds even without my seeking them.

I am like a child who has newly learned to walk. Your hands float inches away from my hips, ready to right me when I tip, to turn my path when I veer toward a ledge. All the while I think I am walking alone.

I sit here. The chair supports me, and the floor underneath holds the chair. The foundation below and, further, there is the ground. Your powerful arms underneath it all. Let me feel this support driving up from you through the worldly objects and manufactured surfaces, right into me. Buoyed and grounded all at once. Protected from toppling, directed away from disaster.

Try as I may to wreck the plans you have laid for me with my willfulness, my efforts to thwart you always amount to a puff of air against a mountain.

Let me, therefore, believe myself to be your protected, favored child. If I am so fundamentally loved, from the depths of the earth, what then shall I do with the energy otherwise spent in defending myself against imagined calamity? It never happens. So let me spend this effort in giving to others, pointing out to them the supports underneath that they may not have noticed, or have forgotten.